Yahoo News Off the Rails
April 21, 2015
The article titled Purple Reign on The Baffler tells the story of the derailment of Yahoo News. The author, Chris Lehmann, exerts all of his rhetorical powers to convey his own autobiography of having served as a Yahoo News editor after being downsized from a more reputable publication, along with any number of journalists and editors. The main draw was that Yahoo News was one of the few news organizations that were not bankrupt. In spite of being able to produce some high-caliber news, writers and editors at Yahoo were up against a massive bureaucracy that at its best didn’t understand the news and at its worst didn’t trust the news. For example, the author relays the story of one piece he posted on militia tactics of ambushing police by breaking the law,
“Before the post went live, I fielded an anxious phone call from a senior manager in Santa Monica. He was alarmed… for a simple reason: “I haven’t heard of this before.” I struggled to find a diplomatic way to explain that publishing things that readers hadn’t heard before was something that a news organization should be doing a whole lot more of: it was, in fact, the definition of “news.”
One of the saddest aspects of the corporate-controlled news outreach was the attempt to harness the power of the traffic on Yahoo’s site by making all internet users reporters. Obvious to anyone who has ever read a comment section online, web users range from the rational to the bizarrely enraged to the racist/sexist/horrifying. Not long after this Ask America initiative tanked, Lehmann’s job description was “overhauled” and he resigned.
Chelsea Kerwin, April 21, 2014
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
Quote to Note: Search and Its Infancy
April 19, 2015
Navigate to “Moving Search Forward.” Here’s the Marissa Mayer quote which I highlighted:
We firmly believe that search is still in its infancy – and this partnership marks the next chapter in our exploration of how to make search truly great.
Like Penelope’s suitors, vendors are pretty convincing until Ulysses turns up. By the way, search has been a thing for more than 50 years, and I am getting tired of the “baby” metaphor. Search has plateaued, and it will take more than a former Googler’s rah rahs to make a difference.
Stephen E Arnold, April 19, 2015
Yahoo: A Portion of Its Fantastical Search History
April 15, 2015
I have a view of Yahoo. Sure, it was formed when I was part of the team that developed The Point (Top 5% of the Internet). Yahoo had a directory. We had a content processing system. We spoke with Yahoo’s David Filo. Yahoo had a vision, he said. We said, No problem.
The Point became part of Lycos, embracing Fuzzy and his round ball chair. Yahoo, well, Yahoo just got bigger and generally went the way of general purpose portals. CEOs came and went. Stakeholders howled and then sulked.
I read or rather looked at “Yahoo. Semantic Search From Document Retrieval to Virtual Assistants.” You can find the PowerPoint “essay” or “revisionist report” on SlideShare. The deck was assembled by the director of research at Yahoo Labs. I don’t think this outfit is into balloons, self driving automobiles, and dealing with complainers at the European Commission. Here’s the link. Keep in mind you may have to sign up with the LinkedIn service in order to do anything nifty with the content.
The premise of the slide deck is that Yahoo is into semantic search. After some stumbles, semantic search started to become a big deal with Google and rich snippets, Bing and its tiles, and Facebook with its Like button and the magical Open Graph Protocol. The OGP has some fascinating uses. My book CyberOSINT can illuminate some of these uses.
And where is Yahoo in the 2008 to 2010 interval when semantic search was abloom? Patience, grasshopper.
Yahoo was chugging along with its Knowledge Graph. If this does not ring a bell, here’s the illustration used in the deck:
The date is 2013, so Yahoo has been busy since Facebook, Google, and Microsoft were semanticizing their worlds. Yahoo has a process in place. Again from the slide deck:
I was reminded of the diagrams created by other search vendors. These particular diagrams echo the descriptions of the now defunct Siderean Software server’s set up. But most content processing systems are more alike than different.
Contextual Search Recommended for Sales Pros
April 14, 2015
Sales-productivity pro Doug Winter penned “Traditional Search is Dying as Sales Organizations Make Way for “Context” for Entrepreneur. He explains how companies like Google, Apple, and Yahoo have long been developing “contextual” search, which simply means using data it has gathered about the user to deliver more relevant answers to queries, instead of relying on keywords alone. Consumers have been benefiting from this approach online for years now, and Winter says it’s time for salespeople to apply contextual search to their internal content. He writes:
“The key to how contextual search delivers on its magic is the fact that the most advanced ECM systems are, like Google’s search algorithms, much more knowledgeable about the person searching than we care to admit. What you as a sales rep see is tailored to you because when you sign in, the system knows what types of products you sell and in what geographic areas.”
“Tie in customer data from your customer relationship management (CRM) system and now the ECM knows what buying stage and industry your prospect is in. Leveraging that data, you as a rep shouldn’t then see a universe of content you have to manually sort through. Instead, according to Ring DNA, you should see just a handful of useful pieces you otherwise would have spent 30 hours a month searching for on your own.”
As long as the chosen algorithm succeeds in catching what a salesperson needs in its net, this shift could be a terrific time saver. Sales departments should do their research, however, before investing in any contextual-search tools.
Cynthia Murrell, April 14, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
Yahoo Acronym Mania: MaVeNS
January 28, 2015
Short honk: I read “Marissa Mayer Pretends “MaVeNS” Isn’t A Silly Acronym, Says It Represents Yahoo’s Future.” The odd ball acronym is getting less coverage than Yahoo’s Alibaba tax play. I am not sure if MaVeNS will be sticky. According to the write up the acronym is supposed to denote for me mobile, video, native advertising, and social.
My question is, “What happened to search?” I thought Yahoo was going to create a better search system. I would have accepted the bone of the “S” representing search. Oh, well. Xooglers are a breed apart. But the US government does a much better job with acronyms and code names than Yahoo I believe. Oh, Yahoo does a better job with tax surfing than some other companies.
Stephen E Arnold, January 28, 2015
Inside the Creative Commons Dataset from Yahoo and Flickr
January 5, 2015
These are not our grandparents’ photo albums. With today’s technology, photos and videos are created and shared at a truly astounding pace. Much of that circulation occurs on Flickr, who teamed up with Yahoo to create a cache of nearly 100 million photos and almost 800,000 videos with creative commons licenses for us all to share. Code.flickr.com gives us the details in “The Ins and Outs of the Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons 100 Million Dataset.” Researchers Bart Thomée and David A. Shamma report:
“To understand more about the visual content of the photos in the dataset, the Flickr Vision team used a deep-learning approach to find the presence of visual concepts, such as people, animals, objects, events, architecture, and scenery across a large sample of the corpus. There’s a diverse collection of visual concepts present in the photos and videos, ranging from indoor to outdoor images, faces to food, nature to automobiles.”
The article goes on to explore the frequency of certain tags, both user-annotated and machine-generated. The machine tags include factors like time, location, and camera used, suggesting rich material for data analysts to play with. The researchers conclude with praise for their team’s project:
“The collection is one of the largest released for academic use, and it’s incredibly varied—not just in terms of the content shown in the photos and videos, but also the locations where they were taken, the photographers who took them, the tags that were applied, the cameras that were used, etc. The best thing about the dataset is that it is completely free to download by anyone, given that all photos and videos have a Creative Commons license. Whether you are a researcher, a developer, a hobbyist or just plain curious about online photography, the dataset is the best way to study and explore a wide sample of Flickr photos and videos.”
See the article for more details on those tags found within the massive dataset. To download the whole assemblage from Yahoo Labs, click here.
Cynthia Murrell, January 05, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Yahoo: The Ghosts of Christmas Past
January 2, 2015
I read “The Day Marissa Mayer’s Honeymoon at Yahoo Ended.” The write up did not mention Ms. Mayer’s penchant for arriving late. That’s a plus. The article states:
Why was Mayer throwing away all the goodwill she had earned with a series of policies that were, at best, poorly rolled out and badly explained to employees or, at worst, plain mistakes. They wondered, more seriously than at any time since she joined, if Mayer was actually up for the job of saving Yahoo.
What Ms. Mayer did, however, as many in attendance will recall, was read a children’s book. The article points out:
No one understood what Mayer was trying to say.
The article walks through a number of interesting managerial actions, including the variation on Neutron Jack’s winnowing of the troops in GE’s business units. Yep, he actually yelled in the meeting I had the thrill of attending. He also turned red. I know that fear was part of the method. Did not work for me, however.
The article provides a useful list of Googley actions that used to work at the GOOG. At Yahoo, the shadow of Semel created a different ethos. Resignation? Indifference? I am not sure.
If you want more about missteps, you will be interested in the book the article promotes. Why not advertise on Yahoo?
In my opinion, Yahoo is wending its way to the same fate that befell Lycos. Is there a Marley amongst the Yahooligans?
Stephen E Arnold, January 2, 2015
Will Two Xooglers Burnish Yahoo?
November 12, 2014
I read an exclusive story. Know how I know the story is “exclusive”? Here’s the title:
Exclusive: Some Unhappy Yahoo Investors Asking AOL for Rescue
Obviously you have to read the foundation’s exclusive. I want to focus on a different question: Can two former Google executives repair Yahoo’s revenues? I am less than optimistic. I used an illustration in one of the briefings I did during the era of Terry Semel. The picture featured a sinking ship with Mr. Semel’s face Photoshopped into a captain’s uniform.
As I pointed out years ago, once an Internet portal service loses its momentum, flat-lining is the upside. The downside is a slow, gentle drift into irrelevance. So the answer to the question, in my opinion, is, “Long shot.”
I like to recall Yahoo’s former chief technology officer railing me on a conference call about Yahoo’s super-advanced search technology. How is that working out?
Stephen E Arnold, November 12, 2014
Will Yahoo Oust Its Xoogler?
October 3, 2014
I read “Yahoo Turns to Ad Agencies Amid Calls for Change – Report.” On the surface, Yahoo wants to hire a pod of pros to brush up the Yahoo brand. What ever happened to the Yahooo! crafted by that fellow from Big Bear. I liked that yodel.
But tucked into the wordage was this passage:
Alternative Investment Management & Research, in a letter that said Mayer should consider selling at least a large chunk of Yahoo to Japan-based telecommunications company SoftBank — and allowing that firm’s CEO, Masayoshi Son, to run Yahoo.
That old Google magic does not seem have much of an impact on Alternative Investment Management & Research.
Would Masayoshi Son do a better job with Yahoo?
My hunch is that this type of thought plus others are zipping around the Yahooligan stakeholders. Why not hook up with Xoogler run America Online. That outfit still derives a chunk of its revenues from dial up modems. Do two Xooglers a Warren Buffet make?
Stephen E Arnold, October 4, 2014
Yahoo Kills Its Directory
September 28, 2014
Yahooooo. Remember that sound. Once it was a happy yodel. Soon it will be a howl of agony. The Directory created by the original Yahoos, Messrs. Filo and Yang is to be terminated with extreme prejudice. The top Xoogler has decided I learned in “Yahoo to Shut Down Another Batch of Products as Activist Investor Pushes for AOL Acquisition.” The Directory spawned Web search. Web search spawned online advertising. Online advertising created the environment that killed precision and recall. In 20 years, finding information related to what the user actually wanted arrived and will soon depart.
The article asserts:
Directory, meanwhile, is one of Yahoo’s oldest services. As the name suggests, Directory is basically a directory listing designed to help users find the types of websites they’re looking for. Years ago, services like this were a valuable resource but times have certainly changes and Directory will come to an end on December 31.
My hunch is that Yahoo itself may experience the departure of a senior executive in about the same time frame. And the AOL clarion call? Two aged sparrows do not a peacock make.
Stephen E Arnold, September 28, 2014
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
